alt Hacker News> There will not be a [..] process for submitting patches by [any] means
> Outside involvement still matters: clear bug reports
So I can find a bug, I can fix it, but I am not allowed to tell them how exactly I did it.
Instead they have to re-figure it out. The team must be thrilled to re-do work they know was already put in by others, repeatedly.
As a user-and-eveloper, why would I sink time into a project with such rules that put a barrier to improving my life with the software? It seems much easier to use Firefox or Chromium, where my fixes actually meet open ears.
It was very useful for me in the past when a new Chromium version crashed on my product, that I could go and suggest a fix to V8, and it was rolled out in the next Chromium release so my product worked again (https://github.com/v8/v8/commit/4f8a70adca01c). Without this, maybe Chromium developers would have never bothered to fix it because of lack of time to figure it out.
> a pull request no longer tells us as much as it used to about the person submitting it
Nobody should need to know anything about any person submitting a pull request. Hopefully whether code that makes it into Firefox or Chromium was never based on the "effort" or "faith" of the submitter, but based on the correctness of the code in review.
Reviewing code fixes is strictly easier than coming up with them yourself.
This holds true automatically: In any situation where it isn't, you can just write the code yourself and done.
As a project you can always ignore or close a PR you want to write yourself instead. But it seems unwise to bar yourself from the _option_ of reviewing an outside contribution, or using it as input for your own re-write.
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Reviewing code in PRs is not a no-effort action. If there are 3 people working in the project, and thousands of people submitting bugfixes, then no matter how useful those bugfixes might be, the 3 people will be totally overwhelmed by the sheer number of PRs.
There might be value in your bugfix, but maybe that value is not greater than the cost of reviewing and accepting it.
> Reviewing code fixes is strictly easier than coming up with them yourself.
This is completely false, for any sufficiently complex project. The fix might be a single line change, but the consequences might be far reaching.
> As a user-and-eveloper, why would I sink time into a project with such rules that put a barrier to improving my life with the software?
Please don't! You don't owe the project anything. The other side of that equation is that the project also doesn't owe you anything. As simple as.
Firefox and Chromium are running much larger teams, let alone the Linux kernel, that other people suggested as a model. Maybe they can afford accepting your contributions.
> Nobody should need to know anything about any person submitting a pull request. Hopefully whether code that makes it into Firefox or Chromium was never based on the "effort" or "faith" of the submitter, but based on the correctness of the code in review. Reviewing code fixes is strictly easier than coming up with them yourself.
You state these things as if they are facts, but they are completely contrary to the lived experience of open source maintainers - not only my own and the TFA's but quite a large number of others who have shared similar pieces.
Would you mind sharing a link to one of the open source project you've been maintaining and reviewing contributions on for years that forms the basis of your expertise on this matter?
You can still tell them how you did it, just not in the form of code/patches. You should be able to describe it in prose so that the maintainer understands your solution approach.
> It was very useful for me
Exactly. You want others to change to fulfill your needs. Their priorities and needs are different. In this case, it was evaluated and found not to be useful (cost > benefits).
> So I can find a bug, I can fix it, but I am not allowed to tell them how exactly I did it.
You're allowed, they'll just ignore it. Same as how sqlite and some other projects operate.
> So I can find a bug, I can fix it, but I am not allowed to tell them how exactly I did it.
You can still submit a bug report and tell them exactly how you did it.
> Reviewing code fixes is strictly easier than coming up with them yourself.
Unless it's hundreds or thousands of AI slop PRs each pretending "here's a bug I fixed it"
> So I can find a bug, I can fix it, but I am not allowed to tell them how exactly I did it.
Pin pointing the issue is way more than valuable than code. If you wrote a fix, you have analyzed the bug. The value is there, not in the fix. Sharing your fine analysis is the maximized contribution. Code is an optional bonus at most.